Everyone knows that companies like Comcast throw money around to protect their interests, but it can still be surprising how far they’ll go. The Switch has a report showing how the cable lobby will pour money into even the smallest elections to prevent cities from getting a toehold into the fast broadband market. In some cases, the results are absurd. In tiny Longmont, Colorado, for instance, cable companies “spent over half a million dollars trying to prevent four percent of city households from gaining access to municipal fiber on any reasonable timescale.” Longmont finally prevailed in last night’s election, passing a bond initiative to fund a next-generation fiber optic network.